Analysis

Working with a reduced playlist consisting of some of the most danceable songs from each album in the corpus, this cluster dendrogram attempts to cluster groups of songs together based on similar qualities. As will be seen in the heatmap page, these traits are the timbre coefficient, energy, valence, acousticness, speechiness and loudness variables provided by the Spotify API.

Looking at which songs cluster together, a few things stand out: ____ [analysis pending]

Analysis

[analysis pending]

Playlist Links

• Dance Gavin Dance

• Royal Coda

• Stolas

• A Lot Like Birds

• Body Thief

• Sianvar

• Smaller Artists

Analysis

This plot (and all the others in this “Discographies” tab) depicts the relationship between danceability, popularity, and release date across the entire discography of the band (or bands) in question.

Immediately upon viewing this graph it becomes clear that Dance Gavin Dance’s discography features an upward trend in danceability starting from 2013. This trend makes sense; this year contained the first release with their newest and current vocalist, Tilian Pearson, whose influences notably lie in the genre of alternative pop, as visible in his solo career. The trend’s gradual accumulation checks out as well - when he first joined DGD, Tilian was fresh off the heels of his time singing for Tides of Man, an alternative rock band with a grittier, heavier, and discernibly less poppy sound. As his time with DGD progresses, Tilian’s influences have become more predominant in the band’s sound.

Through this graph we are also able to identify some outliers - notably the band’s most and least danceable songs, and an entire album which, for having a considerably pop- and funk-influenced sound, is rated on average as not being particularly “danceable”. These, respectively are 12 Hours, 630 Miles in the top left, Untitled 2 in the bottom right - both of which are interlude tracks with limited vocals - and the erratic, high-energy 2011 album Downtown Battle Mountain II.

Interpreting these outliers can provide some insight into how Spotify’s API measures danceability. In seeing that 12 Hours, 630 Miles, the slow outro to their 2007 album Downtown Battle Mountain, which has a consistent tempo, rhythm and very little variation in timbre throughout is considered incredibly danceable, while Untitled 2, the introduction song to 2023’s Jackpot Juicer continuously builds up (i.e. changes timbre) to a climax that occurs in the following song, Cream of the Crop, one can hypothesise that consistency is a central factor in Spotify’s calculations of a given track’s danceability. The relatively low placement of tracks from Downtown Battle Mountain II would coincide with this inference, as the musical complexity (and at times incoherency) of the 2011 album far exceeds anything else the band has released, and could overrule their funk-influenced timbre in the Spotify API’s calculations.

Analysis

When interpreting A Lot Like Bird’s graph, it is important to understand that the band, which is more influenced by (and thereby representative of) the progressive post-hardcore genre than it is of Swancore - with this knowledge in mind, it makes sense that its trend is a negative one, with danceability decreasing as time progresses and the band delved into a more eclectic and experimental style. Similarily, the peak in 2011 with the release of Conversation Piece aligns with Kurt Travis (DGD’s former clean vocalist) joining the band, and bringing his funk influences with him.

Lo and behold, yet again two outliers and “most danceable” tracks in a band’s discography are interludes or non-songs: Abbr. from Conversation Piece is a track which does not feature any variation - if anything, its consistency is its defining feature in an album which is otherwise fairly erratic. Similarily, In Trances, the introduction piece to 2013’s No Place is a spoken word poem supported a repeating sample of a grandfather clock chime over a trap beat.

On the other end of the scale is Recluse from No Place. According to drummer Joseph Arrington on Rocksound (via Genius Lyrics) “If there was ever a song that combined ideas, styles, chaos, melody and batty time signatures…this song is even worse (better?!) We took our strange phrasing ideas to the absolute limits with this song”. This description of the song’s “madness” is more than apt, its polyrhythmic foundation of 4/4 kick and 6/8 snare patterns are likely the reason for this song’s lack of dancability. Like with Dance Gavin Dance, ALLB’s characteristics point towards Spotify API focusing on consistency when deriving a track’s danceability.

Analysis

A number of points of interest arise from this graph. Firstly, and most noticeably, the spike in danceability between Royal Coda’s releases of their 2018 and 2019 albums, Royal Coda and Compassion, respectively. This shift aligns with the exchange of the band’s supporting guitarist, Thomas Erak (formerly of post-hardcore band Chiodos and currently of mathcore band The Fall Of Troy) for Will Swan (of Dance Gavin Dance), who brought along with him the pop and funk influences which Dance Gavin Dance was going through at the time. Here it is also worth noting that RC’s lead vocalist, Kurt Travis was Dance Gavin Dance’s second vocalist, and was one of the main contributors to the band’s initial adoption of funk influences - hence it is likely that reuniting musically with one of his former bandmates could have inspired the change in sound between RC’s first and second albums.

Secondly, with regards to noticeable outliers, three that stand out: See Them Faceless from the self-titled Royal Coda album, All In Question from Compassion, and As We Fall Into Deep Waters from 2022’s To Only A Few At First. In line with the hypothesis that Spotify calculates danceability by consistency, See Them Faceless’s consistant tempo and relatively uniform dynamics (volume) make for what the API considers a more “danceable” experience. On the other hand, All in Question’s wide changes in dynamics, tempo, and even time signature, and As We Fall Into Deep Waters’ shifts between faster and slower segments make them less danceable.

Finally, taking a look at the two interlude tracks across RC’s discography, Suffolk and The Innocence Of - Reprise (from Royal Coda and Compassion, respectively), these tracks also reflect the danceability hypothesis: Both initially sound like they’d have an even danceability, featuring an acoustic riff supported by quiet. lyricless choral vocals, but Suffolk transitions from a 30-second sample of classical music into its acoustic riff, then into a loudening sound of static, whereas The Innocence Of - Reprise only consists of its main section. This likely shows that quantitative inconsistency in sonic qualities (whether of tempo, timbre or volume) take precedence in calculating danceability, their qualitative characteristics (such as a human understanding that quiet volumes and slow tempos being less enticing of dancing).

Analysis

From first glance, and contrary to the perception that Swancore (following Dance Gavin Dance) is moving towards a more danceable sound, Stolas’ chart seems to indicate the opposite, that the band reached a peak in danceability with its second release, 2014’s Allomaternal, and leveled out for its final release, the self-titled album, 2017’s Stolas.

However, it is worth noting that for the band’s two earlier albums, the majoraty of songs are less danceable than from their third, self-titled one, and that a number of outliers do heavily influence the trend of the graph: Thief & the Hourglass and Captured Light from 2013’s Living Creatures, Somatic from Allomaternal, and Euphoria from Stolas.

Of these, Somatic stands out as particularly clear support for the danceability hypothesis being investigated: the 5:11 minute song features a constant tempo and dynamics, and most importantly, a distinct rhythm. Whereas other songs on Allomaternal are truer to Stolas’ eccentric and erratic sound, Somatic’s consistency and trance-inducing repetition (which align with the song’s lyrical context - being a dream of the album’s protagonist according to bassist RJ Reynolds) contribute to the Spotify API’s interpretation of a relatively relaxed song as being a danceable one, and ultimately increases the average danceability of Allomaternal as an entire album.

This being said, there is an alternative interpretation of the shape of Stolas’ graph: a concept named Recapitulation. A phenomenon I have previously approached in Returning to the Tonic: Using Swancore to Expose Aesthetic Taxonomies as Restrictive Historical Agents in Music, the conceptual consolidation of a genre’s “ideal” sound is often responsible for inspiring gradual homogenisation in its sound over time (A cyclic process I denoted as “recapitulation”). Arguably the first band formed in the second generation of Swancore (ca. 2012 - 2017), Stolas’ sound is still largely influenced by external genres, rather than being influenced by a perceived notion of what Swancore “needs” to sound like. In this manner, Stolas’ diversion from the trends of Dance Gavin Dance and other Swancore bands could also be a result of having maintained a higher degree of creative input (conscious or otherwise) over their sound than the genre within which they are trying to write. Indeed, while newer Swancore bands tend to follow this trend towards danceability and pop, Stolas notably took influence from avante-guarde scenes when writing music for Allomaternal and Stolas, allowing them to secure for themselves a truly unique and (in my opinion) under-appreciated niche within the Swancore genre.

Analysis

For initially having a sound closely related to Stolas, Body Thief’s graph tells a much different story: whereas the former’s danceability tapered off with successive releases, the latter’s has one of the most distinctive increases over time, across every band in this corpus. This difference quite possibly correlates with the bands’ relatively different lifespans: Stolas was formed many years earlier and released its first album 2 years before Body Thief, and ended its career in 2018 (though they will reunite in June of 2023 for one night for the anniversary of Living Creatures’ release). Body Thief’s relative longevity, surviving 4 years longer, and recency via persisting to present-day, has allowed the band to adapt to newer trends in the Swancore sound.

Shame as it is, familiarity and consistency - two of the main characteristics of pop (and most popular music for that matter) - are fundamental to its success, and tend to . These characteristics are most prominent in Body Thief’s latest album, 2022’s Every Ending, with songs like Death, Drugs and Dancing, Exit Wound All Our Love featuring the familiar pop “verse -> chorus -> verse -> chorus -> bridge -> chorus -> outro” structure, a major deviation from their previous albums more free-flowing organisation of verses and choruses, such as in Night Owls in Mating Season from 2019’s Travel Glow. It comes as no surprise, then, that when looking at the graph, the 5 most danceable tracks all come from Every Ending (An album all whose tracks are above a 0.4 danceability, with most over 0.5), while the 5 least danceable (even excluding the to-be-mentioned outlier) are all from their earlier albums, with a majority from Speak in Hibernation.

In terms of outliers, an outstanding one is Parasites in the Water from 2015’s Speak in Hibernation. This track has something of a Suffolk (from Royal Coda) Syndrome, whereby the track enters and exits with a sample of a completely different tempo, timbre, and so forth. In this song’s case, completely different to Suffolk it is actually a sample of unidentifiable tempo as it is of, per the song’s name, the sound of running water and the lapping of waves. This disruption of Spotify’s tempo analysis certainly contributes to the Parasites in the Water’s incredibly low danceability (within the bottom 5 of this entire corpus), but also unlike Suffolk, the song is not particularly consistent to begin with - this would explain the difference of nearly 1 full unit of danceability seperating them.

Sianvar

Analysis

Given that there is not much data in this plot of Sianvar’s discography, it is hard to make any guesses about the direction in which the band would have gone had it continued to exist. However, that is not to say that this data is useless: it actually serves as an apt snapshot of

Smaller Artists

Analysis

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Chromagram

Cepstogram

Chromagram

Cepstogram

Analysis

Now understanding that danceability, while correlated but not synonymous with a poppier sound, is based on structural qualities of a piece, a

Recluse (A Lot Like Birds, 2013)

Analysis

As discussed in the section on A Lot Like Birds’s discography, the chaotic and “batty” (per Joe Arrington) Recluse from the album No Place is the band’s least danceable song. This tempogram, a visual representation of the changes in tempo across the song’s duration, should help gauge the accuracy of my earlier hypothesis regarding how Spotify’s API conducts its measurement of a given track’s danceability.

Represented by lines of concentrated yellow, Recluse’s tempo is shown to modulate quite dramatically at many parts of the track, with intense and fast-paced sections followed by much slower and drawn-out ones. Additionally, there are points in the track where the analysis is not very distinct or readable (such as between approx. 60 and 100 seconds into the track, where there are hardly any horizontal, “even” tempos represented by yellow lines, but rather an array of vertially oriented yellow dots projected seemingly at random). This inaccuracy is likely due to the difficult polyrhythmic drum patterns on which the piece is based, which I discussed in the earlier section (as a review, Arrington plays a 4/4 kick drum underneath a 6/8 snare pattern, each part of which guides a different section of the other instruments - Bass and the band’s screamer follow the kick drum, while the guitars and clean vocalist follow the snare). Another possibility is the software confusing the heavy distortion throughout the song for percussive presence, which would confuse the tempo of the piece.

This would explain why, between approx. 125 and 135 seconds, where there is a reduction in the thickness of the song’s sound (guitars, bass and clean vocalist pull back, allowing drums and harsh vocals a much clearer presence), the graph is at its clearest, depicting a slight accelerando, or increase in speed around 250bmp, along with some less distinct but still visible tempo harmonics at 400 and 500bmp, respectively.

In the end, it is likely that this song’s structural complexity, in conjunction with strong variation througout the piece and an imprecise analysis by the Spotify API, are what contribute foremost to its low danceability. Expanding from this, it would explain why a good number of songs from ALLB’s (and other Swancore bands’) discographies are considered to have a low danceability despite having a discernably poppier timbre and influence: their structural complexity and variation impede upon their percieved ability to make someone dance. You can have an incredibly funky riff (such as in Vanity’s Fair from ALLB’s Conversation Piece), but it on its own won’t make the piece more danceable if it’s surrounded by grittier, inconsistent segments.